Microsoft and Novell have made good on their 2006 interoperability pact. Microsoft and Novell jointly announced that Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise has been optimized to run as an "enlightened" guest on Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor platform. Windows Server 2008 customers have been able to run as a virtualized guest on SUSE since last June, when SUSE became the first member of Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program, which Novell has helped to fine-tune. Now SUSE is optimized to run on Microsoft's Hyper-V as well.

Take Microsoft Office/Sharepoint integration, why don't we see an OpenOffice.org version of that? why don't we see an end to end solution in the opensource world to the Office System? too much time spitting at Microsoft than doing something productive? too much complaining about patents than listening and addressing what customers needs are?

The biggest reason, and the primary reason people get so worked up about it, is because microsoft traditionally haven't published the specs of their formats or the interfaces used by such programs to integrate...

Which means that those trying to create competing software have to expend significant effort reverse engineering microsoft code first... And it's also often necessary to recreate the whole stack rather than creating individual components that can interoperate with the microsoft components.

OpenOffice developers are spending far too much time trying to reverse engineer microsoft's binary formats, and trying to implement their poorly documented OOXML format, and reverse engineering the undocumented ooxml-based format msoffice 2007 uses, to work on new features...